There are many ways to tell the same story, Khala often says, though she only tells me her version of it. The elders’ narrative is different. Mama’s even more so. But I have long since learned not to confront Khala about her contradictions. Baba says that when a person is grieving, they start running in circles in their heads. It’s hard to make sense of the fact that a person who was once living and breathing with us no longer exists. Like learning the sky above you is no more. What can you imagine in its absence? 

I understand this well. I was only eight when Mama decided to let the river claim her. Khala never recovered from the incident. Baba didn’t either though he likes to pretend he is over it now, no longer haunted by the seductive touch of grief. The elders say I never grieved because I haven’t shed a single tear since Mama’s death. This is not true. I think Mama took all my tears away with her when she left. That when she jumped off the cliffside, she prayed fervently for this sacrifice to render my eyes dry.

When I was first born, I would not stop crying. This is how Khala tells the story. 

She says I felt the elders’ contempt, that even as an infant, I understood that I was not wanted. I was the first and last baby after Nuh’s flood. This was not the real Nuh’s flood, Khala always clarifies, because we don’t have Prophets anymore. She says life would be much easier if we had Prophets who could pray for miracles. Our Nuh’s Flood cut us off from the rest of the world in a way that even building an Ark wouldn’t have helped. 

The residents of Settlement A0351 suffered because of the flood. They had to swallow many hard truths: that they had no way to import food from the big cities and no way to contact anyone from any other community to barter goods; that their current supplies were enough for a few years at best only if they were careful with their rationing; and that soon, even the fish that had migrated to the rivers below, in the valleys brimming with the water of melted glaciers, would find kinder homes for themselves. There was no way to escape the cliffside; no way to get out of the skeletal village, this man-made island, on the top of the world. They were alone with the last wisps of the clouds. No rescue helicopters nearby, no sign of any government officials who had once promised that their turn would come, just after the first 350 displaced communities. 

The day after Nuh’s Flood, the residents of A0351 gathered in the Common Field to pass a law: no children would be conceived from that point on. The voting was unanimous. There was no prescribed punishment, no real institution to uphold the law—that was not needed. They had seen enough. They would persist until the last of them took his or her final shuddering breath. This, they asserted, was their own choice. An intentional extinction. Their last act of protest. 

“What garbage!” Khala says scornfully sometimes. “They all seemed to think that if you surrender by choice, if you take back your so-called agency, you are more or less taking away your enemy’s satisfaction. But who is this enemy? Our ‘enemy’ doesn’t care. There is no one to witness our extinction.” 

I understand Khala’s logic although I find her contempt for everyone else distasteful. I also understand the logic of the law. I understand it must not have been easy standing bare-feet on the rugged landscape of the Common Field, making the decision to simply wink out like a candle reaching the end of its wax-stick. I understand, moreover, that it must have been even tougher for Mama—who remained silent with the information that her period was a day late. She raised her hand with the rest of them. She voted no children and went home and prayed that I didn’t exist. 

“But of course, you had to come,” Khala says affectionately. “You little rascal. You know you made your Mama sick all nine months, as if you were pushing back all the food with your tiny hands inside the womb? She was sickly and pale by the end—your Mama.” 

There were other reasons for my mother’s nausea. This, I have heard from her myself. She was worried sick for example that the elders would put something in her drink to get rid of me. Worried that no midwife would show up in our little tent when I was born. That I would be stuck mid-way—head out, body in. That both she and I would bleed to death and leave Baba alone. 

There were attempts but not as hostile as Mama had imagined. The attempts mostly consisted of words, cruelly and casually thrown around, to remind Mama of the weight of her decision. There were also some who would jump to her defense; say that I was technically conceived before the law. But as time passed on and no other child was born after Nuh’s Flood, a kind of resentment brewed within the community. Other younger couples eyed me with jealousy. 

“Nazar,” Khala says. “Nazar is a dangerous thing. This is why you cried all the time.” 

Khala insists that they tried everything; gave me all sorts of tried-and-tested medication, the last of it left from their previous stock. Nothing worked. I cried all through infancy and cried afterwards too. And every night, Mama would emerge from our tent like a ghost, with me cradled in her arms, wrapped in white cloth, and she would walk all the way to the edge of the cliffside, where the two of us would stare at the rivers below together.

“You knew,” Khala says. “As a baby, you knew that your mother’s soul would retire there. In the river.” 

How can a baby be privy to such details, when she doesn’t even have access to the most basic words? If I had to guess, I would say I just liked the sound of the rivers, cradled between the shoulders of the mountains. Liked watching the glaciers glinting in the moonlight, sparkling like peris, like unicorns, like all glittering creatures in children’s tales. To a child’s eye, the view must have been less hostile. When you are six or seven or eight, you don’t yet see how beauty and destruction are deeply intertwined.

“No.” Khala shakes her head. “You knew.” 

Did I stop crying when Mama took me to the cliffside? Khala says yes, why else would your mother go all the way there, while the elders insist that I never stopped crying. The community doctors began to worry that I wasn’t drinking enough water to compensate for all the tears. They said that I had a glacier inside of me and that it was always melting. That if you gathered all my tears, you would have Nuh’s Flood all over again. 

“Dramatic, dramatic,” Khala says. “You didn’t have that many tears. But you did cry. Quite a lot.” 

Everyone is unanimous in the following detail: when Mama jumped off the cliffside, I stopped crying. As if all along, I had been crying because Mama had been alive. No one says this but this is always the implication. Words are curtains. You pull them back and suddenly, you can see all the ugliness lurking behind. The elders look at me and they think: she should have been aborted once discovered. They think: look at her audacity—to be born and to kill her mother like that. It’s an unreasonable thought, to blame a child for her birth. But like Baba says, when a person is grieving, they start running in circles in their head. They try to find someone to blame. I am an easy target. I am called Aas; my name means hope. And hope is notoriously cruel, is it not? 

—

Khala does not blame me for Mama’s death. She says at eight, I probably felt guilty. I felt as if my crying had killed her. So I stopped crying. 

I don’t know if that is accurate either. I don’t know what I felt when I was first told that Mama had jumped. I remember my father, remember holding his big hand, and watching as everyone contributed to the digging of the grave. I remember praying the janaza, being told that God might never forgive Mama because she had taken her own life. I remember Khala pulling me aside, telling me that God is more merciful than I can imagine, that my mother must be in heaven. And I remember thinking: How do all these people know what God is thinking all the time? 

The day Mama died, Khala took it upon herself to be my mother. This was a surprise to no one. Khala and Mama were sisters in the truest sense—attached to the hip, whispering secrets in the dark. Khala was not like Mama at all, though. Mama was slower, gentler, preferring silence to the constant cawing of tales. Khala was full of wild stories, the ones she had gathered by incessantly questioning everyone about their ancestry. The day Mama died, Khala took my hand and told me the story of the two princes called Ajib and Gharib for the first time. She said it was the story of Ajib and Gharib, but the story was mostly about Gharib and his mother. She said Gharib and I had a lot of things in common. She said Gharib’s mother also killed herself, though nobody really talks about that. She said: nobody will talk about your mother either. 

—

Once upon a time, there was a King, and the King had two sons called Ajib and Gharib. Ajib had everything he could wish for—loving parents, a good education, a steady path to the throne. His privilege, however, had made him weak. So, when the devil came whispering in his ear, he predictably transformed into the worst tyrant of his time. 

Gharib was born out of wedlock. He was the son of one of the King’s many courtesans and because of this reason, he and his mother were exiled once Ajib came into power. The latter was wreaking havoc all over the Kingdom but that didn’t really matter. Gharib and his mother had more pressing concerns: like how to survive in the wilderness of the jungle. 

“Like us,” Khala adds each time. “The tyranny of Kings in other places means nothing to us right now.” 

Gharib adapted quickly; he began to forage and hunt for his mother and himself. He spent all day looking for food and all his mother could think was: I should have killed him when I had the chance, should have ended the pregnancy, should have hidden him. Before they had been exiled, the head courtesan had pulled her aside and told her every single horror story that featured illegitimate sons. Those who are not meant to be in this world, she had said, don’t last very long. 

Gharib’s mother did not tell him that, as not to discourage him from finding his place, but she could not bear the guilt that frothed at her mouth every time she looked at him. It drove her to take her own life. 

“That seems unnecessarily selfish,” I had said once. Khala did not disagree. 

Gharib didn’t realize his mother had died; he thought he had simply lost her to the wilderness. Nevertheless, he was built out of a certain kind of stubbornness. The kind of stubbornness that drives a mother to keep her illegitimate child. And so, he carried on. He led many different conquests but the reasons for those conquests were misplaced. The first few were to secure a wife; he was sent on them by kings reluctant to give their daughters to an illegitimate prince. The last few were to spread the word of God, though they were more about his ego than religion. Gharib would emerge bloodied out of each of them, holding a banner high above his head. The soldiers would fall down in prostration. Not to God, but to him. 

“This is the story that the elders tell,” Khala always says, her tone becoming dismissive. “But there’s a smaller, lesser-known part of this tale. That’s where we fit in.” 

In the midst of these bloody conquests, Gharib did marry, although his wives never got much space in the narrative. The first of his many wives was not a human; she was a djinn with the name of Kaukab as-Sabah. She was of the lower-caste, the ghuls. Nevertheless, she was not human. And because she was not human, space did not mean the same thing to her as it does to us. She could warp space. It is said that she waited for Gharib for the longest time and when he did not return from his many conquests, she warped space to bridge the distance between them. This is how Gharib’s story really ends. 

At this point of the story, Khala always leans forward, eyes sparkling in whatever light we find ourselves in, on that particular day. “If you look at the lineage charts, you will find that we can trace ourselves back to Gharib and Kaukab as-Sabah. Do you see what that means?” 

At eight years old, I shook my head. Now, of course, I know. According to my crazed aunt, it means that we, too, can warp space. 

—

This is my Khala’s version of the story of my birth: 

I was named Aas because I was the last hope for the people of Settlement A0351. I would join forces with her to warp space to undo the effects of Nuh’s Flood. I would bring us closer to civilization. I would undo the Law of No Children. 

I was not a mistake. I was not accidental. I was what God had planned all along for this abandoned settlement amid the Himalayan mountains. 

“A miracle requires a break in law,” Khala says. “And did you not break the first law of the settlement to be born?” 

—

I had never once in my life felt like a miracle.

Before Mama’s suicide, I had been unwanted in a different way. Everyone was annoyed by my awful crying. I remember some of the neighbors entering our tent without permission, screaming at Mama, blaming her for all my tears. Why would you birth a child if you can’t even take care of her? 

After Mama’s suicide, people saw me as a kind of omen. This was not just because I had not grieved in a familiar way—it was also because Mama’s suicide was not singular. In that same year, there were five other suicides. 

Even that should not have been a big deal. After Nuh’s flood, many had chosen to throw themselves off the cliffside. This was a deeper kind of protest. Kill yourself before the enemy kills you. What else was there to do? 

Except that three out of the five suicides consisted of children. Siblings aged nine, ten, eleven. That had never happened before. It makes more time for the young to lose hope. The youngest suicide before than had been committed by an eighteen-year-old boy.

No one ever said it to my face, but I heard the rumors anyway. That my tears had infused the settlement with a kind of sadness. That even the children, the last few children, were haunted by my tears. That my crying had not just taken Mama’s life but the lives of many afterwards. 

You can’t argue with the statistics. Each year thereafter, the number of suicides increased. The flash floods became siren calls—and we, the weak-willed sailors. 

—

What could I have done except stop crying as soon as I understood that it was detrimental to everyone else? What sort of adults put the weight of lives on a child’s tears? 

Mama’s blood was already on my hands anyway. 

Khala believed otherwise: “The elders are right, we are haunted,” she said, “but not by your tears. We are haunted by circumstance. We are haunted because we are alone, on top of the world, and no one is coming to save us.”

I do not know what to believe. I do not remember why I cried so much in the first few years or what I was thinking when the tears stopped abruptly. I try to conjure them sometimes but there are voices in my head when I do so—and the image of Mama looking at the rivers below with a kind of yearning. 

Khala says: You shouldn’t invest energy into learning how to cry again.

She says: Come. Warp space with me. 

—

Kaukab as-Sabah was a ghul but she was of royal lineage as well. As royal as it gets. Khala says she can trace back her lineage to the djinn in Prophet Suleiman’s court. The good kind, the ones who weren’t trapped. 

“To be of service is in our blood,” she tells me.

Then she demonstrates how to do it. How to close your eyes and imagine that you are floating. Forget there is a ground underneath you. Forget the freezing air, the gentle caress of the humid clouds. Forget the mountain-peaks, like needles stitching themselves into the sky. Forget the image of your mother’s free-fall down below. Physical space means nothing. You imagine a different world and it shows up in front of you. You imagine a better future and already, you are halfway there.

I don’t tell Khala that in those moments of deep meditation, I wish that I could reverse time. Free of human constraints indicates that death means nothing. Means I can bring Mama back. These are useless thoughts, but then so is this exercise. When has Khala ever warped space? What does it mean—to warp space? 

“It means,” Khala says crossly, when I keep failing and keep asking questions, “that you imagine space as a piece of cloth you can fold. Like you can fold your chador. Space is no different.” 

“Then why can’t you do it?” 

She never answers this question. 

Her cruelty, I realize over the years, is of a different kind. The elders leave me with the weight of their accusations. Khala leaves me with the weight of saving the world. 

To be a miracle also is a terrible thing. 

—

I understand why Gharib’s mother committed suicide. She was saving herself from the pain of seeing her son’s desperate attempts to prove his own worth. When you are illegitimate, you spend every day trying to convince the world that you deserve to exist. 

Gharib had an unusual success streak; he was a talented warrior. The first time he fell in love, the King told him to fight the most violent ghul in the Kingdom. Gharib was outnumbered and inexperienced. He had no last name except his mother’s and he had no mother either. All he had at the time were the palpitations of love that beat against his chest like war drums. 

When Gharib returned victorious, the King was taken aback. He made other excuses. It didn’t matter that Gharib had proved his worth. He could not get his happy ending because he was not supposed to be there. Khala says humans can’t decide that. Khala says only God gets to decide that. And God always has a reason. 

I don’t disagree. Out of everyone else, I find this thought the most comforting—that God has a reason for everything. But I am also not like Gharib. I don’t think I need to do anything grand to prove that I exist. Perhaps because I was born in a time of surrender. Because the moment I started to take shape in my mother’s womb, the settlement had already given itself as expiry date. 

And if things proceed as they always do—if we die in the “right” order—then I will be the last one to survive. 

—

“If you are the last one to survive,” Khala insists. “You must do it right.” 

—

If the elders have a story for me, they also have a story for Khala. This is how it goes: 

Khala is the crazed collector of stories, of oral narratives. A kind of historian. A kind of memory-hoarder. But who is she hoarding these memories for? Perhaps, she should have been named Aas. No one knows what her real name is. Even though she is only my aunt, everyone calls her Khala. She says she prefers the name Shahrazad.

Shahrazad is an older heroine, who saved the lives of many women by telling stories. Khala thinks she is also meant to be a heroine. She thinks stories can save lives. We found out we are half-ghul through a story. It was through a story that I made the necessary connections that led us to our common ancestors. 

A lesser-known part of this story is that Shahrazad had a sister called Dunyazad. Dunyazad didn’t kill herself. Who does Shahrazad become after she attends her sister’s funeral? 

The elders say: grief has driven Khala mad. Khala now whispers near the cliffside in the dead of the night. Some of them accuse her of black magic. Some say she is the reason we are haunted.

They say: We understand passion, alright. We want to survive as well. That is why we have found countless ways to survive. Look at our rope-and-pulley fishing system. Look at our vertical terraces, how we scratched and built them on the edges of the cliffside. But we understand that we are half-gone already. We are ghosts of a previous civilization, taking our last breaths, all alone, on the roof of the world.

Khala’s vision is grander—less practical. Rooted in stories of old. Rooted in magic, in miracle. 

I am the one called hope and she is the one who perpetuates it. Or tries to. What an odd pair we make. When death’s angel will come to find us, he will ask: What are you doing here? You are at the wrong place.

There is a strange kind of poetry in it, I guess. Hope and stories always survive in the most unlikely of places. 

—

There is another flood. Then another.

This is not surprising—we are used to melting glaciers, used to mountains shedding their outer skin. The last one takes with it all the fish. The rope-and-pulley system is abandoned, rusting and knocking in the wind. 

I turn twenty-five and so, we pass the quarter-century mark after Nuh’s Flood. A kind of panic engulfs Settlement A0351. That is when the helicopter arrives. 

—

NGO visits aren’t that uncommon. They are rare, sure, but not unheard of. There are many well-meaning people out there in the world who know that we exist. There is even a documentary about us—a documentary that we did not receive any proceeds from, a documentary created by foreigners. 

The elders gather around the NGO reps—an elderly man and a young woman. They carry food supplies with them; they say they will help us become self-sufficient for some time. The elders ask why they can’t just take us all in the helicopter and relocate us. The reps say they don’t have the authority to do so. It’s a dead world already, one of the aunties protests angrily, if you need authority to approve the saving of lives. 

Out of nowhere, the elders start to push the reps to take me, the youngest inhabitant of the settlement with them. Transport her, at least. She has a whole life ahead of her. She will live out her dreams as her mother had intended. I wonder if they want to get rid of me and therefore, my haunting tears, or to save me, to actually give me a better life. 

Khala says she won’t let me leave, that we still have to save the world. She doesn’t talk to the NGO reps. She stops going to the cliffside at night. 

I start hearing strange sounds in my sleep. It takes me a while to understand that it is the sound of my Khala’s sobbing. As if all the tears from the rivers below, all the tears that I once shed, the tears that made Mama jump, have been transferred now to her. 

The glacier called grief, come to take us all. 

—

In the end, the NGO reps decide not to take me. They say they will be back. They help us set up a little farm through solar-powered energy though they acknowledge the sun doesn’t beat down as harshly here. They give us seeds for cold-resistant foods. They give us a water filter. They even have a few yaks on their helicopter.

The elders feed the NGO reps more than they feed the rest of the community. I don’t mind that but Khala is scornful about this too. She says the reps are full of fake promises, that feeding them won’t guarantee their return. 

I am with the others in believing that the reps mean well. The younger woman sheds many tears as she listens to our stories. She asks me about Mama and I tell her the whole story, all warbled and jumbled up. 

“It seems,” she says gently, “that you are telling this story through the voices of others. What do you think? How do you feel?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I don’t live in the past or the future. I live in the days. In the now. Here. To create a story out of my life is exhausting. To make sense of all of it. Because none of it makes sense. Why are we being left here, all alone? Why did God decide I should be born here? Why did Mama jump? Why did I cry so much before? What did my tears mean?” 

She nods thoughtfully, jotting all of this down. 

“You won’t really be back, will you?” I ask bitterly. “You will just use our stories, and you won’t be back.” 

The young woman says nothing. I don’t ask her name and she doesn’t give it to me. No false promises. No memory to hold on to. Just her face, which I slowly forget. Did she have brown eyes? A bob-cut? Was she slightly tanned from the sun, as if she had spent the past few months trekking the Himalayas? 

Before she leaves, she says: “We mean well, you have to understand. We mean well but we are under many constraints.” 

—

This is my story then. My version, my exhausting narrative.

I was born in a time of constraints. I was born without hope. 

I don’t believe I have any power over my larger story. I believe in the day-to-day. I know we can survive one day, and then the next, and then the next. I know that the collective choice to surrender was the right one. 

I know we will go extinct. So, I don’t bother with trying to save the world.

—

Khala’s tears do not stop. Who could have been jealous of her? Afflicted her with the evil eye? 

Her tears are nonsensical and ceaseless. The tears remind all the settlers of me, when I was six, seven, eight. Younger. Crying, speaking of the reasons in a garbled tongue. No one knew why. No one knows why. 

I start whispering stories to her. I tell her a different story—the one that she used to tell me when Mama was still alive. The story of the Maiden King.

I tell her of the princesses who were powerful and were often mistaken for men in their time. The ones who refused to marry, who climbed atop horses, and wielded swords with great expertise, and who were the epitome of beauty, but broke many hearts. When proposals came their way, they would not just reject the men, but kill them. They were especially known for their cruelty. Powerful, unstoppable, and irresistibly alluring. 

Khala confesses to me: “I used to be able to warp space, but I can no longer do that.” 

She says: “I told the NGO reps that they can’t take you because you haunt every place you go to. I told the NGO reps the story everyone tells about you. That you killed your Mama.” 

I tell her that I told the young woman the entire story myself. That stories are just stories and that’s all. That they don’t really mean anything. Time isn’t the same as it was before. There is no need for historians because we are not being witnessed by anything other than the melting skin of the mountains. 

Khala says: “The truth is also a story.” 

—

To warp space, you have to forget stories are tied to places. You have to tell a story where there is no fixed setting. 

Khala and I go to the cliffside in the evening. Khala says that the rivers below have a story. They have a song, they hum it. They hum about the places that were once there. 

“People commit suicide because of nostalgia for their lost homes,” Khala explains. “Displacement hurts because your body becomes physically tied to your home. That’s why the nomads never settled in one place. They were afraid that the ground would hold onto them, would memorize their heartbeat, their footprints. To warp space, you have to become like a nomad. Detached and in a constant state of transition. Ghuls are made of fire and so, they are in a state of constant transition. Fire is not a thing, it’s a process.” 

This is the place where Mama jumped. I don’t remember her quite well. All my images of her are blurred. Seen through a screen of tears. 

“My grief is also tied to this place,” Khala says. Her eyes are glistening. “This is why I can no longer warp space. Because my emotions tie me down. I was not tied to any place before. I was tied to a person, yes, but a person is half-soul. Ghuls also love. But I was not tied to a place.” 

I step closer to Khala. She is trembling. Mama has always trembled too, in my dreams. Before the deed, there is an earthquake in her body. To kill yourself also requires a blind kind of courage. A belief that what’s on the other side is good. In that way, it is not much different than living. 

“Khala,” I say. “Take my hand.” 

“I am haunted,” she says. “I didn’t understand why your Mama did it. Why she jumped. I didn’t understand why you cried so much. But I hear it too, now, the whisper of the devil. I hear the hum of the rivers below. All those tears. All that grief. Everything that we lose has a sound and it’s a terrible, terrible sound.” 

“Khala,” I say again—gently. I think of Mama in my dreams. I think of how she never hears me, even as I call out her name. 

Once the roar of loss becomes loud enough, your heart becomes deaf. 

“Dear daughter,” she says. “Dear Aas. My miracle, my niece. You have to learn it now. It is now or never. I was taught how to warp space by your Nano. I never told you this. But my Mama would tie me up and leave me in her tent for days. She wouldn’t give me food. She would give me enough water to survive. And she would say: if you are desperate enough, do it. Bring me closer. This is your destiny, to learn it.” 

How can truth be a story, if the information we receive is never complete? Khala has never spoken of Nano before. Mama has never either. 

“Eventually, I learned. Then your Nano passed and I was the one who carried her crazed secret and all her crazed stories. I asked her once, why me, why not my sister? Nano said it was because I was the least tied down of her children. I slept in a different tent every single night. That’s how I collected all the stories that I tell you now.

“And then—then I began to practice. I couldn’t do it at a huge scale first. I could fold the space between tents for example, but I could not move our entire settlement. That requires power and numbers. So when you were born, I tried to train you. Even as you cried, I tried to train you.” 

I don’t say anything but a thought strikes me, clear as lightning. Another version of the story. In this version, Khala’s lessons are the reason for my tears. 

“I was kinder in my training,” she says hastily. “My methods were different from your Nano’s. I simply warped space in front of you. I wouldn’t move and I would close the distance between us. Sometimes, I would do it when your Mama was present. She also tried, seduced by my grand plans to save the world. She wanted to save the world for you. But our progress was slow and I was getting frustrated. 

“I would practice on my own. I tried to merge our cliffside with Nanga Parbat. You and your Mama would be present for these moments. You would be amazed by the progress I was making.

“And then one day—one day, I had witnesses other than family. Ruhail’s kids. The ones who jumped.” 

The truth is also a story, Khala says. What kind of strange story is she cooking up now? I am not sure I want to hear it. She is so close to the edge. So close. The wind might knock her down. And the trembling—it won’t stop. 

What ghosts are inside her? What half-ghul part of her is making her this restless? Why can’t she stop? 

I say the last part out loud and she shakes her head.

“You don’t understand. I killed them.” 

My mouth goes dry. “What?” 

“Those little kids that I spoke of. They were haunted. Not by the actual devil. They were haunted by a woman who thought she could still warp space.” 

“You mean you pushed them?” 

“I didn’t push them. They jumped of their own accord. Their father was on the vertical terrace and the winds were awful that day. It seemed like he would fall but he was being brave, in the way men often try to be brave. In the way Gharib once tried to be brave, putting down his life for the sake of women, for the sake of religion. Men always want to make sacrifices, always want to be heroes. His children were concerned. They looked down and they saw death’s open mouth and they saw their father would fall into it. They had seen me warp space before so they said, aunty will you help us? We will go down and hold onto our father while he harvests the kuttu. Then, when we want to come back up, we will signal to you, and you will help us climb back.” 

“But why didn’t you just warp space around their father?” 

“Because he was too far away. The children understood the risk. They had to climb till a certain point themselves before I could help them back up. I had been transparent about this. And they had wanted to save their father. They assumed that their combined weight would help their father harvest the remaining kuttu. That was important—to get the food. For all of us.” 

“But you weren’t able to save them.” 

“The winds were too strong. And yes, I couldn’t do it. They couldn’t use the rope-and-pulley because it was all the way down with their father, so I had told them to just jump, that I would reduce the distance between them and the terrace. Your mother and I had tried it once, though we had never told anyone about it. I was confident and I was still drowning in grief. When the children jumped, all I could think about was your Mama in the rivers below.” 

The father had survived. He had come back to tell the news to his wife. 

And just before the arrival of the NGO reps, he too had jumped. He had let the river claim him, leaving his wife behind. 

Khala’s tears make sense now. The rivers below must have splashed back all the grief from Ruhail’s jump. They must have reached my poor aunt. 

“I ran away from the scene of the crime,” Khala says. “I fled, thinking the rivers were alive and they had teeth made of magnets. I hid in our tent for a few days and no one really noticed. I thought to myself—now I can never save the world.” 

“You didn’t know though,” I say, “that you wouldn’t be able to do it. It cost lives yes, but it was an honest mistake.” 

Khala shakes her head. “It wasn’t an honest mistake.” 

—

I have a dream sometimes. In the dream, Mama is jumping off the cliffside and Khala is right behind her, closing her eyes, trying to warp space, trying to bring Mama back. In the dream, Mama survives and the two sisters hug, tears streaming down their cheeks.

Sometimes, I am the one doing the saving while Khala watches me with pride in her eyes.

Sometimes, the truth is a fact. Sometimes, it is a story. And sometimes, it’s a dream.

—

“I killed her.” Khala sobs. “I killed your Mama.” 

I know that Khala didn’t push Mama. She must have tried to save her and must have failed. And it must have been hard: watching your sister be swallowed by the river.

Not just your sister—but the only person who believed in your grand plan. Not just your sister—but my mother. The mother of a child whose tears were ceaseless.

—

“You were present,” Khala whispers. “You were watching. You don’t remember it, but you watched your mother die.” 

—

The elders say that after my mother jumped, they found her body floating away in the rivers below. Of course, she was too far gone. Her lips were blue, her skin pale and cracked. Fish nibbled at her fingers. These details are both made-up and completely true. 

They say they had to break the news to me and the moment they did, my eyes became completely dry and blank. I said: “Allah Hafiz, Mama” as if I had already known this would happen. 

Baba says he doesn’t remember the elders’ version. He says he remembers his grief and my own, and how big those two were when put together, a mountain he would carry for the rest of his life. He says he was angry at Mama. 

Khala says: You had always known, Aas. You had always known your Mama would jump. 

—

Khala is trembling, still. She takes a step backwards. It’s okay, I want to tell her. You can’t always save the people you love. You can’t always save the world. But I can’t open my mouth. 

“I am being punished in my dreams,” Khala says. “Punished for all my failures. I don’t deserve to save the world. But you are pure hearted. You haven’t killed three children because of fake confidence. Now I want to put your skills to test. I want to put you in a desperate situation. Prepare yourself, Aas. Remember: You are tied down by nothing. You are God’s miracle. Born in an unlikely time for unlikely reasons.” 

She doesn’t have to say it. I know what she means. I know she will jump. She has the same look in her eyes that Mama does in her dreams before she jumps. 

“Don’t jump,” I say with warning in my voice. I have also begun to tremble now. No tears, still. Just the empty void of fear. The chill of helplessness. “I won’t save you. I can’t save you.” 

I begin to move closer but Khala takes another step back. I don’t know who to call. Should I scream? Ask someone else to do the saving? 

Stories. What story can save my Khala now? What words? What words could have saved my mother? There is only the here and the now. The present moment, pulsing like a heartbeat. The present moment, a cage, a prison cell. 

We live in time and we live in space. We live in constraints. No one is ever coming to save us. And my aunt is about to jump. The floods have started calling out to her. Grief has a voice. It has many voices and they all grow louder every single day. What is it like to hear voices in your head all the time? 

“I am not giving you a choice,” she says. Her voice cracks. “My dear Aas, I love you. I hope you can save me.” 

And it happens in a split second—all of it. An eternity in a second. 

Perhaps, time is longer than the here and now. 

—

In that eternal second: 

I force myself to believe that I am half-ghul. That I can warp space. I watch the wind take my Khala. I run to the edge, I close my eyes, and I imagine an alternative. 

I imagine that our mountain moves with its great, ancient legs, that it wades through the flooded valleys, merges with all the other settlements, all three-hundred-and-fifty of them, and makes its way towards the cities. I imagine that our elders flood out of the tents like water, pass the rugged landscape of the common-field, the makeshift solar farm, the sorry supply of kuttu, and the last remaining fish, and find shops where people sell cooked meals. I imagine that Khala, Baba, and I are among those who join in the feast. That we forget what it was like to be alone in this man-made island, forget the view from the cliffside, the mountain peaks, the starry sky, the moonbeams’ playful dance with the clouds, the glaciers bursting with the collective grief of our entire province, of all the settlements—that we forget what it was like to ever be helpless and alone and vulnerable to the song and the tears of the rivers below. That we forget the valleys and homes that have been submerged within them. 

I imagine our particular valley no longer exists. That it is dry—and that before it is dry, it throws Khala back up. I imagine I reduce the distance between the rivers and the cliffside, until a giant wave moves and gently settles Khala back on the edge, where she gives me the most brilliant smile of her entire lifetime. 

And I see my Mama’s features in her face. 

And I say to her: You were right, Khala. I am a miracle. I am half-ghul.